Chapter Seventeen

Nothing much happened on Christmas.

I was, on the whole, glad for it. In part, this was because it meant no catastrophes happened. But there was no celebration either, and I was glad for that part, too. I didn’t love the holiday; it didn’t haunt me the way it did Pepper, but holidays in general weren’t my favorite thing, and this one in particular I didn’t care for. There were several sets of moods associated with Christmas—rampant materialism and conspicuous consumption, family with the implication of traditional values and structures, and Christian theology with overtones of orthodoxy and martyrdom.

The first of those I just didn’t like much, and I could acknowledge that part of that was my relatively privileged position. It’s easy to disdain materialism when you don’t lack for the material, and I’d been coasting my whole adult life on an inherited trust fund. The second, well, family was not something that had good associations for me. I was hardly going to be calling my relatives to wish them well. And for the last, when a large portion of Christian sects would place me in Hell from birth as a demon, a large portion of the rest would put me in Hell because I slept around and wasn’t picky about gender, and most of the remainder would be convinced by the blood on my hands?

Yeah. Not a fan. I didn’t hate the religion, didn’t go out of my way to antagonize them or anything. But I wasn’t fond of it, either. My usual policy was to leave them the hell alone, and I appreciated the faith most when they returned the favor. I didn’t celebrate their holidays.…

Immigration

Immigration is a theme in this story that shows up in a lot of places, and I want to comment a bit on how I depict it and why.

Start with the fact that the majority of characters in this story are immigrants. It’s not something Kyoko really emphasizes or sees as a significant part of her identity, especially after this long; she’s pretty well assimilated into American culture. But it’s something I do try to keep in mind. She was not raised there. Her early life was primarily spent in Tokyo and its immediate vicinity. When she was very young, she traveled more; she went on some business trips with her father, who was trying to groom her for the same kind of corporate salaryman position he held. She also spent time in Osaka with his family. When she got a bit older, in her teens, those things stopped and she was almost strictly based in Tokyo.…

Psychiatry and Mental Hospitals

So mental hospitals and psych wards have been mentioned a few times now. Psychiatry, and mental health in general, can be very delicate subjects for a lot of people, and this delicacy is something I do keep in mind while writing. All the same, though, I want to take a moment to comment more extensively on the prevalence of these topics, and on the tone with which they’re handled in the story. I will note, a priori, that I am an extremely biased source here. I have extensive experience of the mental health system, and my experience has not been good nor normal. I’ll comment on that further later, but I feel I should stress this up front, because it does heavily impact how I write about this topic. Additionally, all of my experience has been in the United States. This kind of information is very hard to really get from the outside of a culture, so I do not know nearly as much about how the system works in Japan. This caveat is significant and likely unavoidable in impact when I’m describing her experiences in Tokyo, particularly with how long ago those were. That said, and with the additional caveat that this note is on the long side, let’s dive in.…

Chapter Sixteen

peppersghostinthemachine: morning. how’s the vixengoth?

I laughed at that nickname. I laughed hard enough that Capinera, who was sitting on the other side of the room reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, was looking over at me curiously. EmeraldKeychain: Okay, vixengoth is pretty good, I’ll have to pass that one along. She’s doing well, and remains insatiable. Also, referencing Pepper’s ghost? Seriously? Also, you’re up early.

I wasn’t. I was up late. Though in my defense, I had caffeine on hand now and was largely nocturnal by preference. Sitting around on a laptop until dawn was pretty standard behavior from me.

peppersghostinthemachine: thank you, thank you, i owe it all to the pernatal toxin exposure. also i haven’t slept.

EmeraldKeychain: Again?

peppersghostinthemachine: yup. i never sleep on christmas eve.…

Chapter Fifteen

“Yes,” I said, eyeing the large man standing behind me warily. “I do mind, but I have a feeling you’re going to do it anyway, so let’s cut to the chase.”

“Great.” His voice sounded distinctly wrong as he said that, an inflection pattern that just didn’t quite work.

He did indeed proceed to sit down, taking the chair Kadir had recently vacated. His movements as he sat were a little off, too, not quite how human bodies moved. Between those and the really unusual size, I would have known he wasn’t human at a glance. I could also feel it, his aura completely lacking the shimmering feeling of humanity and instead consisting of an unpleasantly musky smell and the sound of drunken laughter. But this wasn’t even a convincing enough guise to fool most humans on more than a cursory level.

“So given you’re now sitting down,” I said, as Saori slid her chair over slightly towards me, putting the table between her and the new arrival. “What the fuck do you people want, anyway?”…

Chapter Fourteen

Saori’s car was a disaster.

This was not news. It was, in fact, one of the first things I had noted about her, and it had continued to hold true since. “Saori’s car is a glorious disasterpiece composed of the most bizarre, disturbing, and confusing shit you will have seen today” was just a maxim I had learned about interacting with her. As with most such maxims, it hadn’t taken long for this lesson to sink in.

What I now learned was that this rule applied more extensively than I’d quite realized. She’d had this car less than forty-eight hours, and it was already every bit as strange as the last. She had her usual array, the things that never varied: Emergency gear, medical kit, dice and cards, acetylene cutting torch and sledgehammer, spray paint and rope. Those things were in the car because they were useful, and as a result they stayed there.

But she had also accumulated quite a bit of truly strange shit already. To sit down, I had to move a bag containing about twenty mood rings, a toaster which appeared to be operated by hand-crank, and a plastic box with dozens of restaurant coupons. Being a fool who never seemed to learn, I gave in to curiosity and examined the latter somewhat before putting it in back. All of the coupons were from other cities, I was pretty sure, and it looked at a glance like they were all expired.…